Amazon with Warm Mart has the Sodial 7 watt 300 Lumen Mini Cree LED Flashlight for $5 with free shipping. Ships from Hong Kong. Features aluminum alloy construction, adjustable focus range, and waterproof design.
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this puts all other 'regular' home flashlights to shame.
I have a couple of these with Q3 LEDs and they're great (i use AAs in them). Looks like these are Q5 according to Amazon - anybody have any experience with this version? I may need to investigate - thanks ben for feeding my flashlight addiction.
Q3, Q5, very close to the same brightness. Cree just improved yields and doesn't have enough Q3 anymore to fill high volume orders.
The postman just delivered two of these. They are functionally identical to the '200 lumen' light I paid $10 for a year ago. The new ones are not quite as bright in a side to side comparison and don't focus the LED image as sharply, but I don't think I'd notice the differences in normal use. They certainly are an excellent flashlight for $5!
I decided to compare run time with my older, but identical looking light. I put the same type of freshly charged NiHM AA batteries in the old and new lights and turned them on side by side. About 75 minutes later, the old light started to dim. This is consistent with my previous tests of this light. Half an hour after that, the new light was still bright when I had to stop the test. During the test, I noted that the old light got warm while the new light did not. It appears that the new LED is much more efficient than the, year old, one. It looks like the run time of the new ones is more than 50% longer than the old one. That is a big deal for me because I use these as bicycle lights.
It could be that they are set to run at lower current, but it might just be that minor imperfections in electrical contact cause a lower current. For example if you were to use steel wool to clean the body tube ends, take the switch out and scrub the tailcap and the threads, that they'd run similarly long and bright.
IF you can get the driver board out (may require soldering) there is also one or two sense resistors which if you take a razor blade or x-acto knife or similar to the top, you can scrape away some of the conductive metal film to result in lower current, longer runtime.
There are of course other options, light that cost a little more but run at lower current still to achieve over 2 hours runtime.
I got a couple head lamp 300 Lumen 5watts and they very bright and zoomable. These don't look very bright in the picture. I think #4 got it right by saying that's 200 Lumen light. The only thing I like about this flash light that is can use other types of battries that last longer beside AAs.. 5 bucks it pretty decent. I got, Oh!. About over 30 flash light or more or I would pick this one up for my collection. Harbor Fright got the 1 watts for FREE all the time with coupons..
It's not 200 lumens, maybe 150. Doesn't matter though, you don't want a AA light that tries to be as bright as possible, it'd get so hot you couldn't hold it and have terrible runtime.